Titan Rocks

On Monday of this week, I had the pleasure of attending a talk by NASA scientist Chris McKay. Back in January 2005, a lander called Huygens (pronounced "HOY-gens") touched down on the surface of Titan, Saturn's biggest moon. It was an incredible achievement! McKay is a co-investigator on an instrument onboard Huygens. He came to my university to talk about that weird moon. Whenever I hear a good talk, I try to walk away with one cool thing I learned. This time I really did, and now I'm gonna share it with you. Titan is big, as moons go. It's 50% wider than our Moon, and 80% more massive. That means it's less dense than our Moon. The Moon is mostly rock, and so Titan must be mostly material less dense than that. We know there's a lot of water ice out there in that part of the solar system, ...